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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

badlands.

An arid terrain characterized by severe erosion of sedimentary rocks.

8 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈbæd.lændz/
  1. An arid terrain characterized by severe erosion of sedimentary rocks.

  2. An arid region of Western Canada characterized by significant erosion and odd land formations containing dinosaur and other fossils.

Where this word comes from

From earlier Bad Lands, calque of Canadian French mauvaises terres à traverser (“bad lands to cross”), itself a calque of Lakota Makȟóšiča (from makȟá (“land”) + o- (attributive prefix) + šíča (“bad”)).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.